The newer songs on the Rolling Stones's album Grrr! may not have struck oil,
but the band's energy remains undimmed, their back catalogue
endlessly renewable, writes Helen Brown.

The wiley old silverbacks of rock ’n’ roll haven’t had a hit since their 40th anniversary compilation, 40 Licks, back in 2002, so what more are they offering on this 50th anniversary collection? Well, it’s 10 songs longer and will get completists to part with their cash for two brand-new tracks that bode well for the forthcoming tour, proving the band can still rip into that jagged, bluesy vein with remarkable vigour. There were rumours that Keef’s reference to Mick’s “tiny todger” in his bestselling 2010 autobiography might have spelt the end of the band, but perhaps it’s exactly this sort of ridiculous adolescent friction that fires them on. That and the money, of course.

Because the Stones are currently being discovered by a whole new generation. You might think therefore that they would re-curate their back catalogue a little to suit 21st-century tastes. At first glance, the track listing looked more weighted towards the band’s early, Sixties output. But a breakdown of the tracks reveals that 40 Licks had 19 songs from the Sixties, 10 from the Seventies, four from the Eighties, three from the Nineties and four Noughties numbers. Grrr! shakes down with similar showings per decade: 24 tracks from the Sixties, 12 from the Seventies, seven from the Eighties, three from the Nineties and four from the Noughties.

Grrr! is probably the better compilation and gives a clearer sense of their chronology. Where 40 Licks opens with 1968’s Street Fighting Man, Grrr! revs into action with the Stones’ first single, bizarrely Awol from 40 Licks. Released in 1963, Come On was a Chuck Berry cover. But whereas the original saw Berry delivering his lines about his clapped-out car as though he were leaning nonchalantly against the bumper, Jagger snarls his frustration like a man grinding the key over and over. Grrr! also boasts their predatory version of Willie Dixon’s Little Red Rooster, a vengeful reworking of Irma Thomas’s Time is on My Side and the terrific We Love You.

Newer songs find them in classic terrain. The lighters-aloft, stadium chugga One More Shot sees Jagger begging “take me back / I’m all yours, Jack”. The over-respectful NME described Doom and Gloom as a “Gimme Shelter for the Wii generation”, and while it doesn’t have anything near the fire or melody of Gimme Shelter about it, Jagger puts over an entertaining DVD box-set mash-up of Lost and The Walking Dead as he recounts a dream of crash landing in a swamp and shooting zombies. And things are kept topical with a reference to “Fracking deep for oil/ But there’s nothing in the sump”. While the Stones may not have struck oil with these songs, their energy remains undimmed, their back catalogue endlessly renewable.